The smell hit him. Death. Two days of decay. Bron was digging now in an area that might have been a kitchen–the remains of a table on one side, smashed dishes, on the other side a potbelly stove tilted against the half-standing inner wall. Rotting eggs and insect-gnawed bread in the rubble. Breakfast? Preparations for a lunch basket?
Two bodies, a man and a woman. They were about his age or a few years older, and they were wrapped in each other’s arms, faces turned into each other’s necks. They had clung together when the shaking had begun, only to be crushed by a beam falling from the roof, landing across them both in the same instant. They had died together.
Bron couldn’t lift the beam, not with his hands alone. He dug out around them enough to determine that no one else lay with them in the debris. Perhaps they had been cooking together. Perhaps they had been enjoying their early morning meal before each began the work of the day. Perhaps they had been talking, smiling, love in their eyes as they looked at each other.
He paused, folding his hands into fists, and waited till the shaking passed over once again.
“Nyasha! Nyasha!” His throat was raw, his nerves ragged, every muscle aflame. His hands were sore and scratched, his arms quivering. And still there was the girl to find, the girl the entire town had forgotten.
Bron paused again, tilting his head. Was that a voice? Perhaps it had been the wind, or a cat, mewling across the street.
“Here,” it came again, soft and low and battered. “I’m here.”
“Nyasha?”
“Yes. I’m here.”
Her voice was weak, cracked, and barely audible, but he heard it. Bron’s body didn’t stop aching, and his bleeding hands didn’t stop burning, but they didn’t matter. He had to get her out. That was all.
Nyasha’s voice came from further back in the house, perhaps a bedroom area. The inner walls had held up better than the outer ones, for whatever reason, and Bron could see places where the walls and the roof leaned against each other, forming spaces underneath that would be almost sheltered, almost safe. He would have to be careful not to dislodge anything important.
“Keep talking to me,” he ordered. “I need to hear your voice so I know where to dig.”
“I’m here,” she said. “I was leaving my room when the blast came. I was in the doorframe between my room and the hallway. I think that’s what saved me. I’ve been trapped here for two days. There’s just a crack, and I couldn’t open it, but I saw the sun go down and come up again and go down and come up. I thought I would die here. Who are you? Why are you here? I don’t know your voice.”
He dug through shingles and latticework from the fallen roof, making a path toward her. “My name is Bron. I came from Jalseion seeking help at the Sanctuary. Dr. Burdock told me where to find you. Keep talking, Nyasha.”
“Dr. Burdock? I’m surprised he even remembered my name. He’s a good enough doctor, but sort of wibbly, you know? Like a catkin, all soft and fluffy, with his chubby face and his fuzzy beard and his spectacles. The children like him, though, the little children who come to the clinic. I think they like him because he looks at them, not through them….”
Her voice might have been fading, but he was pressing closer, and so he didn’t lose her. “All right, Nyasha, I’m almost there. Can you push against the stuff around you, to show me where you are? Be careful.”
The pile of wattle and plaster in front of him shifted, bulging out almost from the center. Bron managed a smile, tired and relieved. “There you are. I’ve found you, Nyasha.”
He reached into the ruin and drew her out like birthing a farm animal, weak and shaky and blinking in the sun. Her dark brown skin was almost white with plaster dust, and her large brown eyes darted this way and that, trying to take it in. She was even younger than he’d expected, perhaps two years younger than Calea had been when she’d become a Guide.
“Can you walk?” He kept his arm around her, feeling her tremble.
Nyasha nodded, more absently than purposefully. “My goodness, it sure is a beautiful morning, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Bron said solemnly.
“I never really noticed how nice the mountains look before.”
He looked with her, north, to the mountain range that separated Jalseion from Thyrion. The peaks had once been green and mist-covered, or so legend said, but since the world had become desert, people called them the Burnt Mountains. They were orange and dark yellow and reddish-brown in the morning light. And yes, certainly beautiful, though Bron had never thought to call them so anymore than Nyasha had. He and Calea would have to travel over or around them to get to Thyrion, and they were therefore a barrier, an obstacle.
“Yes, they look very nice,” he said. “Come now, let’s get you back to the clinic. You need to rest and eat.”
“And drink. I’m very thirsty.” Her cracked lips curved in a smile.
“That too.”
She almost tripped over her own feet, her long skirt, as he led her out of the ruin of her home. But the path he’d made through the rubble went back to the kitchen area, and there Nyasha ground to a halt, staring. The bodies of her parents. Bron winced and looked away, sorry he’d forgotten.
Nyasha said nothing. Did nothing. She just stood there and stared for a moment that could have been an hour.
Then he gently tugged her into a walk again. He took her out of the ruin and back to Calea and the doctor.
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